Owen Davis

Owen Davis is a co-founder and the president of Identity Commons, a member-owned international federation that empowers individuals and organizations to own, control, and share their online identity and profile information in an environment of mutual trust and peer governance. Mr. Davis studied sustainable communities and electrical engineering in college, was a principal in two successful high-tech companies, Gates Distributing and Lighten, Inc., and has been a business and computer consultant. Believing that business is an engine of transformation, he has been working since December of 2000 to learn and apply the principles of distributive governance pioneered at VISA to create a socially beneficial commercial venture. The Identity Commons is the result of this effort. He also has been active as a member and trustee in the Chaordic Commons (www.chaordic.org), a global network of individuals and organizations in every sector committed to pioneering new ways to organize, based on the discovery and expression of deep common purposes and essential principles of right relationship.

Brad Garlinghouse

Brad Garlinghouse joined Yahoo! in 2003 as vice president of communications products, responsible for strategy, management, development, and financial performance. Mr. Garlinghouse is an expert on the intersection of communications and the Internet. He previously served as CEO of Dialpad Communications, one of the world's largest providers of PC-based telecommunications services. Under his direction, the company's user base grew from just over 2 million to 14.5 million, and he successfully diversified revenue sources from advertising to premium services. Earlier in his career, he led venture capital investments in software, communications, and Internet-based businesses at @Ventures. He also has held product and marketing leadership positions at @Home Networks, TCI Internet Services, and SBC Communications. Mr. Garlinghouse received a Master's degree in Business Administration from Harvard University and a Bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Kansas.

Jan Hauser

Jan Hauser, a leading thinker and proponent of advanced social networking software, is currently a Visiting Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. A former principal architect at Sun Microsystems, Hauser has applied his knowledge of complexity science and technology to resolving issues in global sustainability, and has been a featured speaker at Planetwork, The Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Banff Centre New Media Institute. Hauser has long promoted the idea that complexity science may offer breakthroughs in the area of self-organizing computing systems, and one of his early efforts to marry complexity science and Sun’s Jini technology was chronicled in the July 1998 Wall Street Journal "Looking To Give Executive a Living Computer." He also co-authored a seminal paper on identity and trust, published on the peer-reviewed First Monday site, and entitled "The Augmented Social Network – Building Identity and Trust in the Next-Generation Internet."

Paul Resnick

Paul Resnick is a Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. He previously worked as a researcher at AT&T Labs and AT&T Bell Labs, and as an Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Professor Resnick's research focuses on SocioTechnical Capital, productive social relations that are enabled by the ongoing use of information and communication technology. His current projects include analyzing and designing reputation systems that help maintain trust among strangers online, convening technologies, and ride share coordination services. His articles have appeared in Scientific American, Wired, and many other publications. He holds Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the University of Michigan.

Jeff Ubois

Jeff Ubois is a staff research associate at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems, and a co-chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivists' Television Interest Group. He writes about issues in television archiving and digital video at http://www.archival.tv. In addition, Mr. Ubois is an analyst with Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based consulting group that specializes in email and collaborative software, and a columnist for Messaging News. He began reporting on the Internet in the mid-1980s, and has written for Internet World, Upside, Information Week, the Economist Intelligence Unit, CFO, Digital Media, MacWEEK, Asiaweek, ENT, Midrange Systems, Wired, the New York Times Syndicate, Asiamoney, The Japan Times Weekly, .inc, Technology Access, Computer Security News, Federal Computer Week, and Bloomberg Business News, among others.

Keith Teare

Keith Teare has started or co-started many successful companies. He was the founder of RealNames Corporation in 1997; co-founder of The EasyNet Group in 1994; founder of cScape in 1984 — now part of UK public company NetB2B2; investor and chairman of Ivan Pope’s NetNames in 1996 —now part of UK public company, Group NBT plc. He was also co-founder of CYBERIA, the world’s first Internet Cafe chain, in 1994. Mr. Teare is a board member of SnapNames Corporation and a member of the public policy advisory board at VeriSign. He was a winner of the British Telecom award for Internet Innovation, London 1995, on behalf of CYBERIA Café. Keith is a Computerworld-Smithsonian Laureate: he won the Award for Innovation in Science & Technology, in 2001. Mr. Teare is General Partner at Archimedes Ventures, publisher of the TechCrunch blog.

Nico Popp

Nico Popp is the Vice President of Advanced Products in VeriSign's Security Services business unit. He leads VeriSign's efforts in developing new products and services. Prior to VeriSign, he was RealNames Corporation's chief technical officer from 1997 to 2002. He led the engineering team that designed and built the first version of the Keyword system, and continues to work actively within the IETF and W3C to define and build a standard protocol for human-friendly name resolution. Prior to joining RealNames, he was engineering manager and director for WebObjects at NeXT Software and Apple Computer. While at NeXT, he designed and implemented real-time automation and speech recognition software for the NeXT factory. Mr. Popp began his career as an automatic control engineer for Avions Marcel Dassault, where he designed and implemented automatic pilot prototypes. He earned a master of science degree in robotics from Stanford University, and a bachelors degree in aeronautics from Sup'Aero, France.